Wow, lkcl actually updated his advogato
information. I didn't think he was working on TNG anymore,
but couldn't really tell from that. The guy is flocking
smart, and I've gotten along with him really well, when I
had time to play around with Samba.
I just got around to reading jfleck's
diary, after seeing quite a few people respond to it, both
here and on gimpnet (irc.gnome.org). I totally understand
what all the fuss has been about now. I'll leave reactions
for some other time, probably.

I love to bike, but I've never been into watching things
like Le Tour. If I'm going to watch an event, I'll go watch
something here in town, such as the races out at the Velodrome.
Speaking of which, if you're anywhere near Portland, don't
miss the Alpenrose
Challenge on the 27th through the 29th of this month.
There will be some AMAZING sprint competition there, the
quality that you see at big international events. But, I
just read John's diary entry, and the coverage of this
sounds interesting. I may read some more about it, so that
I don't feel so silly when talking to people about the
Tour.

BTW, I made some packages of Norm Walsh's XSL stylesheets
today. They're not perfect, specificly in that they don't
have a catalog file, but it removes one more set of "crufty"
files from my system. Oh, you want to see?
http://www.ibiblio.org/gleblanc/ has what exists. that
website is messy though...

I just read
this article from dyork's article. I
really like the point that it makes, I think it parallels a
lot more than the church ministry. For example, the boy
scouts of america do a tremendous amount of community
service work. I don't think that it's particularly good
"article", but it would be an article that I'd publish
formally. There's a lot of anti-microsoft rant in there,
which detracts from the point a bit. I'm tempted to write a
bit on the topic, but nobody is paying me to be a free
software advocate, and I know I've got other projects which
I'm going to spend my time on first.

Computers

Macintosh bigots, don't flame me, this is supposed to be
funny!
One of our professors on campus today, carrying his light
blue, semi-translucent Mac notebook (the one with a handle
on it). One of my co-workers saw him walking across campus,
and thought that it was brightly-coloured toilet seat.
We all had a good laugh over that one. His communication
skills are pretty poor, but we get a good laugh out of him
every now and then.

GNOME

I just updated a bunch of plain GNOME RPMs. There's a new
Nautilus, GConf (this one works even if you don't have the
-devel package installed), gal (another packaging fix), and
gnumeric. I think I updated a few more, but I'm not sure
what they are. The new nautilus (1.0.4) is another fairly
large improvement. Highly recomended upgrade.

Biking

I finally contacted the bikes guy about getting a track
bike, and I'm going to spring for one. I was out at the
track last night, and it was a good workout. After several
months of riding, I'm STILL in patheticly bad shape. I
think I need to find a good training book, and start doing
hard weeks and easy weeks, and get myself into decent shape.
I think a new bike will help too, because I'll be able to
put a smaller gear on it, and not have such a hard time at
the end of the night. See, I can crank that gear around,
but I don't have the physical strength to push the gear on
the rental bikes to my peak sprint spinning speed. Uhm,
yeah, that's hardly intelligible, but I'll have another shot
at it sometime when I'm not quite so fried. I love
biking.

More Computers

I don't see this any of my other diary entries, but we've
ordered new notebooks for the faculty. Celeron 800s, 128MB
of ram, 10GB hard drive, onboard 10/100 MBit network card,
onboard 56K modem, internal 10X DVD drive, internal floppy,
1024x768 14" LCD display, carrying case, mouse. They're
from Dell, a vendor I trust, which is certainly a good
thing. We had a demo machine here, which had a 700MHz
processor, but was otherwise identical. We compared it
against a very similar machine from Toshiba, except that it
had a P-III 700. The Celeron was -faster- for every test
which we performed on it. Either the P-III has absolutely
no performance edge over the Celeron (I'm slightly doubtful
of this, for a number of technical reasons), or Dell is much
better at designing machines (Uhm, yeah, this is my bet)
than is Toshiba. We were leaning towards the toshiba,
because we purchased from them last year, but they couldn't
deliver the machines that we demo'd here, and couldn't even
get us a new demo. Plus, Dell was willing to beat toshibas
price, on an identical (more or less) machine. So, I'm
pretty happy about that purchase, even though I don't get to
use one of these machines myself. Of course, my "boss" has
made sure that he gets one, the selfish bastard. :)

I went over to the Velodrome on Wednesday, and it felt
pretty good, although I was tired due to my forced week off.
I do like biking out there, it's rather fun to race in
circles, and deal with other people being on the track. I
must build up my endurance though, as I'm getting tired at
the end, and can't compete in the mock races. I got a new
chain for my bike tonight, as well as some new gloves, and a
new bottle of Tri-Flo. Great lube, that is. I'll replace
the chain on Thursday, I suspect. Perhaps Friday, we'll
see.

Computers

For the first time in ages, I managed to get my Evolution
working to send mail at work. I'm really pleased, as
reading things in Evo, then having to reply in Outlook was
rather traumatic. As it turns out, it was a problem with my
bonobo install, and nothing with gtkhtml. At least I have a
new bonobo now... I'll try to get myself a new, working,
nautilus tomorrow. I love GNOME.
We've been having some good conversations on the mailing
lists about the direction that help is going for GNOME 2,
although we need to be quick about this, since the API
freeze is in just a couple of weeks. I hope others haven't
waited as long as we have. BTW, don't let me comment on
these things, I clearly have not a freaking clue
about programming, and especially APIs. I thought I'd
written a decent message, but it appears to have been crap.
Ah, well, back to things I understand, I guess.
Work is getting down to actually hiring a person as the
network technician. I want nothing to do with hiring
people, nor even with evaluating their skills. I completely
apathetic as to what happens there. This is a very bad
thing. I should go mail out my resume soon.

running, sort of

I went to "participate" in the Ranier to Pacific relay this
weekend. There are 11 runners on a team, and up until
Friday, I thought I was one of the 11. As it turns out, I
was a backup runner. Ah well, at least I got to hang out
for the weekend, and go to the beach. Cool people, even if
they were MD's. <grin /> I think I'll see about running in
the relay for real next year. I'd love to do Hood to Coast
again, but it's a bit different. H2C is about 1000 teams,
and 2 days after registration opens, it's full. R2P is 100
teams, and I'm sure they could accomodate quite a few more.
It's a bit ironic that r2p seems to end in a bigger town,
which has more/better facilities for the end of a race than
the h2c. Well, I'll write more about this one later, I
think, but not just now.

Why is rudeness such an accepted value in US Teen culture?
It really ticks me off. I'm going to have to return the
favor one of these days... Break some noses or something.
It's such a good thing I can't find out who people are on
battle.net, or I'd probably drive over and beat the living
daylights out of ThaHammerElf. If you see him, leave, he's
a God Damned PK.

gman can't spell, but it's all good,
because he's cool. 50km is a pretty decent bike ride, so
good going Glynn. Get some higher SPF sunscreen... I'd go
with 45 if you're applying it every hour. If it's really
hot and you're sweating a lot, that can wash it off, so get
the waterproof stuff too. <grin />

dyork enjoy Canada any where you like it!
Enjoy SGML/XMLing. Are you biking again? What's the
news?

jfleck is eating advocatos. The only good
thing I have to say about them is that they help me remember
how to spell advogato. :-) Not my fav food, but perhaps
I've just not had them done well. I probably won't, until I
get to going out a lot more, because my dad won't eat
"Mexican food", which pretty much includes southwest stuff
too. Oh well.

The style guide sounds awesome, I wish I had time to read it
right away, but other things take priority. I'm not
entirely sure why, but Advogato seems to be one of them.DV is awesome. That's all there is to it.
Apparently he's made some more speed improvements to
libxslt. Processing time on DocBook: TDG has been cut -in
half-. Truly amazing.

biking
Tuesdays don't seem to be my day for biking. I don't think
I mentioned this, but last week, a Volvo tried to cut me off
at an intersection. I layed the bike down, and slid through
the intersection, under the front of the volve. I lost one
of the handlebar plugs, and got some pretty ugly road-rash
on my hip, and a bruise.
Today, I had a hard ride to get to the track in time, and
just barely made it. As we were coming into the
straight-away near the end of the first lap, I crashed. I
was fatigued from racing to get to the races in time, which
didn't help any. I was drafting off of the two lead riders,
and they hit the head-wind, slowing them down. I was still
going along, and overlapped the tire of the guy in front of
me by a couple of inches. I tried to slow down/get out of
the way, but somehow wound up on the ground. I scraped up
my knee, ankles, elbow, and chest. Not bad, but enough that
they bled, and will look ugly. I also pulled some muscles
in my shoulder, and that's gonna hurt tomorrow. The
handlebar tape on my right handlebar is torn to shreads, so
I'll need some new stuff. I also trashed my glove. They
were really nice gloves... cloth backing, short fingers,
good padding. The padding on the palm isn't really attached
to the fingers anymore. So, a few repairs are in order, and
probably a few days of rest off of the bike. I did bike
home afterwards, nice and slow (well, I didn't work as hard
as usual).
No more biking for me on Tuesday's for a while. I started a
new paragraph here in order to write some more, but, uhm,
I've forgotten what I wanted to write. Must be bedtime.

I finally sent off my resume to somebody today... I don't
know if anything will come of it, but I'm going to start
looking in earnest now, since I can't cope with where
Concordia anymore. There are a whole variety of factors
involved there, which I'll discuss after I'm no longer
employed there.

dyork, I've hated all of the Montreal
natives that I've met while there... They all know english
just fine, but are too arrogant to speak it to you if you
don't know French. Stick with Toronto, which is a really
wonderful city...

biking
My goal when I started biking was to get up to better than
15 miles per hour for my rides, and I'm doing better than 16
on the ride home now. I'm really pleased about that. Goal
setting is a really important part of any fitness binge. I
think my new goal will be 100 miles a week. At almost 25
miles per round trip to work, that means biking 4 days a
week, or at least putting in some serious miles for a couple
of days. I think I'll need to increase that distance in
just a few weeks, but we'll see how it goes.

emergent properties
Wow, jfleck posted a really cool example of
emergent properties in his diary. Thanks! There's a lot
that can be done with that one, I'll have to bring it up
next time I'm sitting around BSing with friends.

rain
Heh, 0.06 inches, huh? We're supposed to get 0.5 inches
between yesterday and today. Not neat storms, but we do get
plenty of water. It's actually been raining since about 10
minutes into the Cat II race last night, not just drizzling.
Pretty fascinating. Oregon is the land that intermittent,
or "delay" if you prefer, wipers were made for. Low is too
fast, and off is too slow.

Hmm, I guess I lied to DV this morning, I can read the
French at the end of mathieu's diary, more
or less (without the help of babelfish).

dyork mentioned something about an
"American aversion to all things metric". I don't believe
in such a thing. I'm an American, and I love metric. I can
convert most things between metric and English Standard in
my head in a trvial amount of time. Metric is incredibly
nice computationally.
I'm amazed that people can get by using vi, or even vim, for
SGML editing. I need to try out Dan's .vimrc, but I can't
imagine it being able to keep up with an editor that
actually reads, and presents options based upon reading, the
DTD. I've gotten some people to write me some "macros" for
things in emacs/psgml, like insert graphics, and other
complex markup. I should write up a -really- good .emacs
for use by the LDP, GNOME, and so on. Yeah, in my copious
spare time. :-)

computer hardware
<rant>
Dan York put something up a while ago about about somebody
trying to put the e-smith server on a notebook (or laptop if
you prefer). He said '...the system must be "PCI-based"...'
and '...I haven't really seen any laptops that supported PCI
cards!..." I'm looking at the website, and I see "PCI-based
Pentium machine" as the hardware architecture. Regardless
of which of those you choose, every x86 based laptop made
today meets those requirements. They're all PCI based. The
memory and the CPU exchange data through the "north bridge".
The "south bridge" controls the expansion capablities, such
as PCI, and ISA slots, and serial and parallel ports. Every
chipset on the market now supports PCI. All of the
notebooks that we've purchased within the past year no long
have a PCI-ISA bridge, meaning that -all- of their
peripherals communicate via the PCI bus. There's no reason
that I can find that it shouldn't run just as well on a
notebook as it does on a desktop system.</rant>
Sorry about that, I like to learn about computer hardware,
and it irks me when I see things that are "just plain
wrong".

Biking
I promised John that I'd write about my race last night
here, so I guess I'd better hop to it. So, on Tuesday
nights they have bike races out at PIR, Portland
International Raceway. It seems that it's a 2 mile track,
very flat, with curves that might be challenging at 150
miles an hour, but are pretty wimpy at 20. I'm not entirely
sure how the entire race went, because I was working too
hard to really think. We started off, and just glumped
together for a while, then strung out into single file.
Either the first or the second time we came through the
finish line (did I mention that it was 5 lap race?), the guy
behind me dove into a little sprint. Colin (a guy I know
from the velo) and I took off in chase, and kept up with
him. We got into a -fast- (for my tired legs, 25mph) pace
line, which I was able to stick on for a lap. As we came
onto the straight-away, after my pull, I didn't have the
strength to keep up with them, so I let them go, and pushed
on by myself. By the end of the race, I couldn't see either
the two guys ahead of me, nor the guy behind me. It's
pretty boring to just crank away for that long, but it's a
really good workout. So, I got third, out of a field of 4,
by a long margin both ways. Unfortunately, they didn't
publish the results on the website, nor did times get posted
on the emailed results. Drat.
Impressions? Well, the race was fun, because it was a
race... and boring, because the track is really boring.
Once I get faster, the other categories look a lot more fun
(40+ people, rather than 4). But I race at just over 20
miles an hour, and they were all doing better than 25, which
is just too fast for me to maintain. Those races will
definately be a good workout for me. Six or seven miles
from work to there, and then eight to twelve miles as a
race, then another bunch (dozen?) miles home. And of
course, Wednesday nights are out at the velodrome, when it's
not raining. I do like bike racing and riding...

I've been off doing other things for a while, but decided I
wanted to write something here tonight. Well, I wanted to
last week, but things were too busy. Anyway,
jfleck has been writing some neat stuff. I
love storms, but there's no such thing in Oregon. I've
heard thunder twice since I've been here. That's an average
of once every 3.5 years.
I have no idea what he's talking about with "emergent
properties". I read that a couple of times, and it still
doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. I should look for
more links on the topic, in all of my free time.

I saw a diary by hacker, and decided to
read it, and as it turns out, he's writing docs for
something that I've been dying to do for a really long time.
Cross-compiling is such a bitch, but it's SOOOOO useful.
Perhaps I'll try it out with Intel to SPARC compiling.
Fun!

dyork was fighting XML/XSLT the other day,
and came across a bug in libxml. Dan, upgrade to the CVS
version, and things will be fixed. Heh, good deal, huh?
I'll see if I can make a snapshot build for you. What Linux
distrib are you using lately? I want to try this Real soon
now, but I've got a few other higher priorities.
I didn't think CDATA marked sections worked properly in XML?
Anybody know the details of what doesn't work properly
here, and care to explain? Maybe I'll ask Liam tomorrow, if
I remember.
I'm not surprised that Hotmail has moved to win2k, really.
This is the first time that they've had an OS with even the
potential to run that sort of a service. I don't think
anybody other than MS would have made the move though, it's
just too expensive to replace a working system that doesn't
cost money, with a less efficient system for which one must
purchase licenses.
Dan also wrote some stuff about the LPI, and about
advogato's certification levels. Good stuff, but I've
forgotten all of the comments that I wanted to make. I
think I should take the plunge and get some Linux or Unix
related certs. Now, to find some sample tests...

Biking
I think I may have a lead on a track bike, for a pretty
reasonable price. The biggest problem with getting a rental
bike is that I don't always get the same one, and some of
them don't fit quite right. The seat is quick release, and
I put my petals on it. However, sometimes the tilt on the
bars is wrong, or they're a bit too high, or too low. I
want my own bike so that I can get it adjusted and tuned
properly for me.
I biked to work last Monday and Tuesday, which felt really
good. Maybe I'll HTMLize my logs and put them online...
Wednesday I went out to the track. I was a bit tired going
into the workout, since my rides to work are really races
against the clock. We did a much longer workout than I was
used to, and I pushed myself pretty hard to keep up with the
pace line. I was 5th from the last to drop out there. At
the end of practice, we did some sprint races. That's three
laps, the first must be at least a walking pace. The rest
can be any speed, but usually the second is slow, and the
final lap is VERY fast. I managed to finish 1 of these, but
I was just barely coherent at the end. A couple of minutes
later, they asked me to go again, but the coach didn't think
that would be a good idea. I -wanted- to ride more, but
wasn't physically capable of it. I biked home pretty slow.
I couldn't ride to work on Thursday, I was just too tired.
Friday I could have, but didn't, ride in to work. I'll
take it a bit easier this week.
I just came up with this... But what I think I'll do is
bike to work tomorrow (Monday), and get a lift home. Then
get a ride in to work on Tuesday, and go out to the races a
PIR, and maybe bike home from there (if it's not dark).
Wednesday I'll get a ride, and go out to the track. The PIR
races are on road bikes, which is good, because mine is well
adjusted, and I can work the gears, almost. Gosh, I want
indexed shifters.

Computers
I finished the exercizes for Chapter 4 in learning perl
today. I keep writing things in Pascal, and wondering why
they don't work. I'll get the syntax down quickly, as soon
as it's not 6 months between hacking sessions. I need to
get through chapter 8 ASAP. 8 is on functions, and I need
to be able to use those to write the build script for GNOME
2.0. Bleah, not enough hours in the day. jrb keeps telling
me to learn python, and I think I've got a good project for
that ready, but I need to get job hunting too. So, Python
is on the shelf for the time being. GPP stuff is going
well, I need to draft a mail to see if there's space to put
binaries on ftp.gnome.org and it's mirrors. I send Red Hat
a set of updates for most of their GNOME packages today,
hopefully dcm will see about getting those into production
soon. I might even get to close a couple of GConf bugs that
are in the Red Hat bugzilla, since I think they're my fault.
;-) Enough for now, I need sleep...

Wow, some dude was a total dick to fejj...
The guy posted only one possible rational argument...
Amazing
I don't really think fejj's first reply was that great, but
it's easy to understand why he posted it. Oh, I see.
They're all flames, but that's the way things go
sometimes.
I REALLY like Evolution, although the snapshots that Ximian
is making kind of suck ass. Speaking of which, I need to
ask Robin if he's had time to hack on a simple build-script,
so that I can feed tinderbox.

biking

Biked to work today, although I got a flat about nine miles
into it. It was raining, so it was really hard to get the
tire dry enough to get the patch to take at all. Of course,
I didn't check well enough, and missed the piece of glass
that was embeded into the tire. I got a new one tonight,
but I grabbed the 650 tube instead of the 700. Rats. I'll
go back, since I need to give them grief anyway. They need
to replace the heel pad on one of my shoes, since it's
already fallen off. I need to swap the tube for one the
right size, and I need to get a real patch kit... the kind
with glue, not just the pre-glued pads. The pre-glued ones
are nice for weight, but they don't seem to work nearly as
well as the ones with the rubber cement. I actually talked
to the mechanic down at the bike shop (I've given up on Bike
and Hike, since they don't keep the sales guys busy enough,
and they tend to intercept you before you can talk to the
mechanics). River City Bikes is where I'm headed lately,
and this mechanic helped me find the good tires. This one
looks pretty nice, and we'll see how it holds up. It had
better be nice, for $50...

Work

Busy, drat. I wanted to be less tired when I got home
today, so that I could do some job hunting. Alas, I barely
had enough energy to sit in front of the TV.